Hero of prod: Emilios Nicolaou

Although Resolve is now the primary on-caller for our entire company, it doesn’t mean there’s any shortage of heroic work happening across the engineering team. So for our final Hero of Prod, we went to our cofounder and CTO, Mayank Agarwal, with a simple question: Who is ResolveAI’s Hero of Prod?

Mayank rattled off a handful of names and stories all of which deserve their own stories, but eventually, one engineer emerged: Emilios Nicolaou.

Emilios has been with Resolve since the earliest of days, joining us when ResolveAI had zero funding, zero customers, and not even an office. Since then, he’s become the type of engineer you want around when something goes wrong. He moves quickly, takes ownership, and, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t consider the job finished just because production is stable again.

One incident that Mayank and fellow MTS Kaushal Patil shared captures why: a spike in database load was putting pressure on our systems, and Emilios found himself right in the middle of the response. He helped identify what was going wrong and deployed the mitigations needed to stabilize the system, resolving the incident at hand.

Emilios didn’t stop there, though. He went back through the Postgres queries contributing to the increased load, using Resolve to identify the problematic queries, cleaning those queries up, and verifying that the changes were actually having the intended impact.

And Emilios didn’t even stop there. He took on the migration of our Temporal database to Aurora and worked on a detailed redesign of our alert pipeline to address the database concerns exposed by the outage. What started as an incident response became an opportunity to make the underlying systems stronger.

Some of the most important work in production engineering comes after the incident, after the alerts are silenced, and after everyone else goes to bed. Digging through what happened, cleaning up the true root cause, documenting what you learned for your team, and improving the system so the same problem is less likely to reoccur is exactly the work we aim to highlight at ResolveAI and in our inaugural Heroes of Prod series.

Emilios Nicolaou, our final Hero of Prod.

If you want to learn more about ResolveAI, check out our About Us page. And if you want to work alongside engineers like Emilios, join us.